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Thank you. and quote, Science Podcast to receive special offers. Welcome to the Science Podcast for May 20, 2016.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

In this week's show, Warren Cornwall talks about an intense study of urban rats.

And David Grimm is here with a roundup of

stories from our daily news site. Now we have David Grimm, editor for our online daily news site.

He's here to talk about some recent stories. First up, we have a story on the giraffe genome.

Every few months we see a novel genome come out. And sometimes I read these papers and I'm like, what do we do with this

information? I mean, what do we really know now that we have the sequence? I think this article,

though, which is about a new sequence for giraffes, does a good

job putting the findings in context. And they do that by sequencing the giraffe's nearest relative,

the ocapope. Okay, compare these critters for us, Dave. How do the giraffe and the ocapope,

how do they match up appearance-wise?

Well, they're closely related, but they don't look very much alike.

The giraffe is the tallest land animal currently on the planet, ranging for about 4.5 to 5.7 meters tall,

whereas the Okapi is more of a horse-sized creature.

And these differences are really important because, as you can imagine, A, the giraffe is going to need some sort of genetic boost for its bones to get this really long neck that it's got and really tall legs.

...